To Tom, who has survived a stodgily old-fashioned prep school in Sidmouth, Bishopstone seems like … school. Hierarchy, discipline, ritual. Everyone in his place. But the fagging, the bullying, the beatings administered often and with relish by beastly but fair masters – the best involving a cane-wielding teacher taking a run-up the length of the school’s celebrated Great Corridor – all this has drifted away quietly in the years after the War, much to Daddy’s regret. Perhaps it is because a good number of the masters are survivors of that War – the Old Shakies, as some of the crueller boys call them, boys who will drop a heavy book to see their teacher flinch or, with any luck, duck behind his desk. What larks. Tom can’t believe that these boys don’t see any connection between the Shakies and the twenty-one gold-leaf names on the board in the school hall. He doesn’t dare say anything, though, which makes him feel like a coward, but anyone who would torment a shell-shocked soldier wouldn’t hesitate to give a good pasting to a first-year boy, captain of the junior colts or not.

Well, I can tell Daddy that they caned me, Tom thinks. That’ll cheer him up. I’ll need to talk it up a bit, though. Because it hadn’t been a proper caning. More a couple of distinctly apologetic taps on the hand in the headmaster’s study. Tom’s offence had been to draw an unflattering sketch of the maths master, John Hugo. He had overdone the man’s nose, though not by much: Hugo has a nose like a goose’s beak, fleshy and pointing straight out, with lavish tufts of black hair bursting from the nostrils. He might have overdone the eyebrows as well, and the beady eyes beneath them … His sketches, though they have got him into trouble this time, have made him popular with the other boys, so on the whole he thinks his caning is a small price to pay. Besides, he’d shown the drawing to Mr Dellal, who’d laughed and pronounced it ‘excellent’.